Not blogged for a long time

Just seems like when I've had something to say I've had no time, and when I have had the time I have nothing to say.
There has been progress in the employment department. We now officially have taxi insurance on the car and it has been wired up for the sign, radio and meter. The fire extinguisher is installed and the local mechanic is booking his fortnight in Torremolinos since we had the work done to bring it up to scratch. Now all we are waiting for is a date for the PSV test - then my beloved will finally realise his dream of having his very own taxi. I really REALLY want this to work out for him; he has wanted it for such a long time.
On the home front, DeeDee laid her second clutch of eggs about a week ago. They are cooking away in the incubator and hopefully will hatch around mid-June. The first two are looking very bad though. I don't think they are fertile, but I have left them in the incubator for now just in case. I think it may be too humid in there so am going to have a look at it tonight and try to sort it out.
The vivarium build/conversion project is progressing slowly. The shelves have been secured and sealed with silicon aquarium sealant. I'm hoping to get the chance to play with my dremel on Monday to tidy up the back - the screws were longer than the depth of the backboard so the ends are sticking out. After that I need to drill the holes for the vents before I take the lot to the glaziers to get runners and doors fitted. Unfortunately I can't get it glazed until hinself is working, so I will have to busy myself with making bits and pieces like hides until then.

Credit crunched

Looks like the credit crunch has finally caught up with us. Poor Owen got paid off from his job on Friday afternoon. It was just a case of the shop not making enough money, so they couldn't afford to pay him any more. It did come as a bit of a shock at first but we have been in worse positions financially and survived, I'm sure was can do the same again. So we've drawn up an action plan to cut our expenditure. Come Monday morning the Sky package will be cut to the minimum, Setanta sport will be cancelled, the phone will be on incoming calls only and we'll be shopping in Lidl and reduced to clear for our food. It doesn't help that the fuel pump in the car went on Friday morning and is costing £200+ to replace. Nor am I looking forward to telling Jenny the childminder. Grace just loves going there, and Jenny and her family are so lovely. I think I'm more upset about that than about Owen losing his job!!
I'm also planning to get the veg planted in the garden so we can supplement our diet with those later in the summer, and am going to get some "stuff" on eBay so I can fund the rest of the vivarium building without dipping into our day to day household money.
Am off to lurk Down the Lane now and get some frugal tips and motivation!!

Eggs eggs eggs!!!

Yesterday morning I followed my normal routine. Grace and I had a wee play then got up, watched some kids tv, had cereal and toast and a nice cup of coffee for me. Grace ended up wearing more coco pops than she ate and I had no hot water, so I rang mum and arranged to take her round there for a bath. I was going to my boss's leaving lunch and had just washed my hair so I rushed round getting it dried, letting the dog out, checking on the geckos. And I found this.....
I was so shocked and so excited! But then I started to panic a bit. I had all the bits for the incubator but it was not built and I didn't have a thermostat to control the temperature. So I very, VERY nervously lifted them into a box of damp vermiculite, packed the box into a bigger box with loads of styrofoam peanuts and seatbelted it onto the front seat of the car. I bundled Grace into her car seat and raced her round to mums for her bath. I then rushed to the pet shop in Carrick to see if he could incubate for me - he had no incubator!! On the pet shop man's advice I got a matstat to complete the incubator and raced back to the house to get it built. I built the incubator in 3 minutes flat then tore round to mums ans stashed the eggs in her airing cupboard to keep them warm.
I was running so late that I had to get mum to drop Grace to the child minder. I made it to work to pick up the girls just in time. We had a nice lunch out then I took the rest of the day off to come home and sort out the incubator.
It has taken most of today but I managed to get the temps to settle between 81f and 88f. They are still plump and a good colour, so hopefully they will turn out to be fertile and hatch soon

Has it really been a year...?

Yesterday mum, Grace and I went to the graveyard to put flowers on my grandparents grave. We couldn't quite believe it has been a whole year since Granny Ross died, it has really flown by.
It was a nice enough day, not sunny but it was calm and the view across Larne Lough was lovely. Grace enjoyed the trip, she carried a pot plant and put it on the grave all by herself. It was a nice trip, good to see the new headstone in place and the grave looking so neat now we've had the stones replaced and the surround cleaned. For anyone visiting from Down the Lane, please note that the conifer is tiny and in a pot!!

Not blogging much....

I've been very lazy about my blogging this month. This is mainly due to being off work with a dodgy disc in my lower spine - I find I can write better in work at a proper PC than I do at home on my laptop. Also the office I work int he majority of the time is in a nice quiet part of the building and mostly of all there is no trace of children's television!!!!
There is nothing much to report with the leopard geckos. DeeDee is fat and pissed off, much like any heavily pregnant female. I am currently planing how to convert 2 shelves of a bookcase into 2 vivariums so they can be separated - I'm worried about DeeDee getting stressed and think she needs her own space. I think I'll blog that separately as it's a big job and I think if I write it all down it'll help me get it clear in my head.
I will definitely be blogging more regularly now my back is all better!!

First shed

Since the geckos came along, my morning routine has changed somewhat. The wait til grace wakes/change nappy/get back into bed together and roll around tickling each other for half an hour while watching Balamory on iPlayer is still pretty much unchanged. but now when we head downstairs, I do not check my emails with a leisurely coffee (milk and 2 sugars for future reference) No, as soon as Grace is munching her cereal I do Egg Check. I go into the viv, gently check all the hides and nooks and crannies to see if DeeDee has laid. Then I try to tempt her to eat a waxworm as a treat because I don't think she is eating much at the moment.
This morning I was excited because Mo has been coming up to shedding his skin. Last night just before bed he looked very white, and I could see a tiny hole in the old baggy skin under his leg - you can just see it in the first photo behind his front leg.
This morning when I looked to see how he was doing, and he looked like a hoodie!!
He was NOT in a good mood so I popped his hide back and left him to it. A further check an hour or so later and he only had his tail left to go, and my dinner time just one foot. By bedtime he still has skin stuck on half a toe so I got a cotton bud soaked in water and helped him ease it off. Am now very proud of both myself and Mo - first big gecko event went very smoothly for both of us! Now it's back to egg watch........

New pets

I have become the very proud owner of 2 very beautiful leopard geckos. Believe it or not I got them for free on freecycle!
I had been looking into getting some kind of lizard for a while. Considering how badly I got it wrong with Rocky, I wanted to really do my homework and be all set up and ready before actually getting the lizard. After a lot of reading I settled on a leopard gecko. So I put a wanted ad on freecycle to see if anyone had any spare bits and bobs like heat mat or bits of wood etc. for decorating their vivarium. To my surprise a lady emailed offering me a vivarium - complete with occupants. She said Echo (the gecko) and Lizzie (the lizard) were a pair of 1 year old females. So the following day, Grace and I tapped the postcode into the satnav and went on our jollies to Tandragee - a journey of around 50 miles. It was not the most comfortable journey for me, my back had been achey from early January and had taken a definite turn for the worse the day before. When I finally arrived I was barely able to walk and getting worried about how I was going to get a vivarium into the back of the car!

The lady, also called Sarah, was lovely though. She brought the viv (only small, about 1ft by1ft) out to the car for me and helped me get it all strapped in. Another 50 mile + drive home, then a stop at the pet shop to order a new viv (a 2 foot one) and I was done!! I couldn't even drive any more so my dad took me to pick up the new viv later in the afternoon plus some crickets etc. for them.
So, over the past week we've re-named them Mo and DeeDee. We have discovered that Mo is a boy and DeeDee is a girl, and guess what? Yes, DeeDee is pregnant! So we have installed a nesting box of damp vermiculite int he viv in the hope that she'll lay a few fertile eggs and start a family. That's DeeDee on the left, she's paler because she's a Bell's Albino. My big boy Mo is a normal and slightly bigger than DeeDee